Monday, February 29, 2016

from "The Lost Children," Randall Jarrell

She sits in my living room and shows her husbandMy albums of her as a child. He enjoys themAnd makes fun of them. I look tooAnd I realize the girl in the matching blueMother-and-daughter dress, the fair one carryingThe tin lunch box with the half-pint thermos bottleOr training her pet duck to go down the slideIs lost just as the dark one, who is dead, is lost.But the world in which the two wear their flared coatsAnd the hats that match, exists so uncannilyThat, after I've seen its pictures for an hour,I believe in it: the bandage coming looseOne has in the picture of the other's birthday,The castles they are building, at the beach for asthma.I look at them and all the old sure knowledgeFloods over me, when I put the album downI keep saying inside: "I did know those children.I braided those braids. I was driving the carThe day that she stepped in the can of greaseWe were taking to the butcher for our ration points.I know those children. I know all about them.Where are they?"

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.